Filbert Anthology the Dusty Town

Filbert Anthology

The dusty town of Filbert, Iowa, was founded in 1836 by a group of disillusioned missionaries and their wives and children. Though not entirely cynical, the founding fathers of this small farming community had suffered a crisis of faith while working with -- or against, it more often felt like -- the Native Americans, and had begun to question the infallibility of their beliefs. Church was still a socially mandatory thing every Sunday morning, but the people led good lives more because that was the way they felt like living than because God had told them to.

At first, life in the small community was entirely peaceful and quiet. But the town grew, as settlers passing by stopped and then stayed, and their families came to join them, and folks got married and their children grew up, some of them going but most staying and marrying and having children of their own, and soon Filbert was a bustling town with a Mayor and a town square and dances during the planting, and the harvest, and in the dead of winter. It was of the size where you still knew everybody's name, but you could go a whole month without seeing a certain someone, if you were so inclined. For the most part, people were not so inclined, and got along well with each other.

The biggest upset that the town ever faced was Iowa's statehood ten years after the town was founded. The first generation of native Filberts were just starting to b born then, and the town was still small. A few of the founding families, however, wanted to move on West now that statehood gave the place an air of too much civilization.

The Walsh's did leave, but everyone else voted and decided to stay. When Filbert got its own school system, their was a brief debate about keeping the Walsh's out of the town's history, but the truth -- and Linda McMurtry, great-great-great-niece of Aldous Walsh -- kept the story whole.

Aldous Walsh

She doesn't visit often.

Quiet's nice.

She didn't seem to care much where we stopped.

I was tired, too.

Still, she could have waited for a nicer plot of land.

or I could have kept on walking.

I hear the kids are moving on, and she with them.

There goes the West.